Web services break out of point-to-point
A team's initial Web service implementation is often targeted at a specific "consumer" software component which is known in advance, at the time the Web service interface is defined. This allows all kinds of simplifying assumptions around security, standards interoperability, etc. and is a very reasonable first step.
However, this kind of point-to-point connection does not realize the full vision and full value of Web services and Service Oriented Architecture.
Ask yourself, "Can I add a new type of consumer, accessing my XML interface, without having to modify the Web service itself?" If the answer is "probably not" then you don't really have a loosely-coupled network; you have a point-to-point connection.
2004 is the year that organizations implement the needed infrastructure and practices to make XML messaging to Web services a true loosely-coupled network.
Security-only infrastructure is supplanted by unified infrastructure
There is a whole range of capabilities (security, standards interoperability, monitoring, service virtualization, etc.) which are best implemented in shared intermediary software (gateways or agents) rather then buried in custom code in the Web service business logic.
Organizations are realizing that they don't want to flow their XML traffic through 4 or 5 different intermediaries to implement this range of capabilities. They would rather have a single piece of infrastructure that can touch the XML data stream once and then interact as needed with other building blocks (directories, system management dashboards, etc.) which are applied across all the data streams (XML, HTML, SMTP, etc.)
The stand-alone XML firewall and SOAP Security Gateway products will gain limited acceptance in 2004 as organizations turn to unified solutions that include all the XML firewall functionality but also include monitoring, standards interoperability, service virtualization, etc.
As Ray Wagner at Gartner put it "Pure-play [Web services] security platform vendors ... will disappear" because "enterprises that use Web services will demand security and management functionality in a single platform."
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